Thoreau - Civil Disobedience.pdf

oth in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and
not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer
the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough if they
have God on their side, without waiting for that other one.
Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority
of one already.
I meet this American government, or its representative, the State
government, directly, and face to face, once a year- no more- in the
person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man
situated as I am necessarily meets it; and it then says distinctly,
Recognize me; and the simplest, the most effectual, and, in the
present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating
with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction with
and love for it, is to deny it then. My civil neighbor, the
tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal with- for it is, after
all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel- and he has
voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. How shall he ever
know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a
man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his
neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed
man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can
get over this obstruction to his neighborliness without a ruder and
more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action. I know
this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I
could name- if ten honest men only- ay, if one HONEST man, in this
State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to
withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county
jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it
matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once
well done is done forever. But we love better to talk about it: that
we say is our mission, Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its
service, but not one man. If my esteemed neighbor, the State's
ambassador, who will devote his days to the settlement of the question
of human rights in the Council Chamber, instead of being threatened
with the prisons of Carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of
Massachusetts, that State which is so anxious to foist the sin of
slavery upon her sister- though at present she can discover only an
act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with her- the
Legislature would not wholly waive the subject the following winter.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place
for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only
place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less
desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of
the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by
their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican
prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his
race should find them; on that separate, but more free and
honorable, ground, where the State places those who are not with
her, but against her- the only house in a slave State in which a
free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would
be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the
State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do
not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more
eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced
a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper
merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it
conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is